(I think)
by kill-kiss-be
Summary: Kathy's thoughts on her friends', and ultimately her own, completion. Post-NLMG.


Kathy's thoughts on her friends, and herself, completing. Applicable to film or movie 'verse. Thank you to Sami for her help with the title, and ultimately reminding me what NLMG taught us all: these poor creatures thought, felt, and mattered.

* * *

_You are tired,_

_(I think)_  
_Of the always puzzle of living and doing;_  
_And so am I._

_Come with me, then,_  
_And we'll leave it far and far away—_  
_(Only you and I, understand!)_

* * *

She'd be kidding herself if she said it came as a shock. It was a miracle in and of itself that he'd made it through so many donations. That he'd still been standing before the last. And yet, she feels her heart beat a little faster, has the nurse repeat the news.

_"Tommy completed at five oh six pm."_

Who could claim she had no soul, when it was the one part of her she was sure was breaking?

* * *

The drive home is deafeningly silent. All Kathy is aware of is the soft hum of the radio, somehow finding herself singing along to songs composed by a nameless woman a thousand miles away, her fingers drumming against the fabric of the steering wheel cover, the gentle, rhythmic, thump of her pulse echoing in her ears. Everything else is blocked out. She is entirely alone.

She hasn't let herself cry in a while. Not really. Not in the way that makes the tip of her nose turn pink, the rims of her eyes red. But she has to. For Tommy. Because he mattered. Because Ruth mattered. Because in two months she'll be as dead as them, and she'll have mattered too. Not just in the way their names are engraved on a mass gravestone - one that thanks them for their service to science, and speaks nothing of their spirit.

She finds the sketches Tommy had drawn in desperation for prolonging their lives just a few years longer. She laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. How foolish, she thinks, that we believed love of all things might keep us around. They have love, in their built up cities, for their husbands and wives and children with sticky fingers and peach fuzz hair. We are disposable, she ponders, tracing the sharp lead lines on the paper with her finger. She's never allowed herself this bitterness before. Never talked against the system. But like the rumours of love buying time, of girls escaping and dying at the gates of Hailsham, Kathy had heard whispers of the life beyond donors and carers. The lives of the people they'd save.

She resents them.

* * *

When she's finally dying, they give Kathy a pile of materials on "completing" and "life after completing". They don't say _death_ or _dying_ at all, just "_completing_" and something about the end of their duties. But they _do_ mention an afterlife, which makes Kathy roll her eyes, because they were all created in test tubes, and taught about it incessantly _("this is how normal babies are born", they'd say, and talk about things that would make the children blush, "but you were different.")_ She knows she will be dissected until her body holds nothing of use, and buried, and then she will decompose and become part of the Earth's cycle, because there is no rest for donors, because they are always owing something, to someone, to somewhere. Forever indebted, for some reason or another.

And still she lets herself imagine this afterlife, those pearly gates and rolling meadows where there is no post-procedural pain, where there is no sense of impending doom, where rainbows colour the sky and butterflies and soft, warm creatures roam about, perpetuating every myth about perfection they'd ever read in fiction.

She imagines Ruth, riding _real_ horses through these meadows, she imagines Tommy, and his tender, lingering kisses, the way they always felt so _full_ even when he was half empty.

When they wheel Kathy into the operating theatre the last time, she remembers the soft kisses she'd planted in a line along Tommy's forehead, and wishes she could feel the same on her trembling skin right now. She closes her eyes, breathes in the sterile air, and finds herself not afraid, just tired, so _tired_, and hoping when she awakens it will be in Tommy's arms again.

* * *

_But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,_  
_And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—_  
_Open to me!_  
_For I will show you the places Nobody knows,_  
_And, if you like,_  
_The perfect places of Sleep._

_(Poetry of E.E. Cummings.) _


End file.
